What’s your prediction for the future of Node.js?
Among tech communities, there is none quite like Node.js. Its core contributors: brilliant. Its user base: passionate. Its future: bright … and blindingly so.
So, as we prep for Node Interactive in Vancouver, we thought it would be a great opportunity to take some of the topics discussed at our first #NodeMinds huddle — and some of the lingering questions — and put it out to our budding community (and the broader Node.js user and contributor base) for feedback. We’ll be holding our second huddle during the conference, and we hope the insights from these #NodeMinds, and the discussion it helps to spark, will help fuel huddle № 2.
This post comes just as tweets are expanding for some users to 280 characters, which should be more than enough to add your hot take to the mix with the hashtag #NodeMinds.
As with all of our crowdsourced posts like this, we hope it serves as a springboard for further conversation, and an opportunity to connect through our shared passion for all things Node.js.
Enough preamble. Let’s dive into our first of three questions in this series: What is your prediction for the future of Node.js?
“Vastly improved stability around native code with N-API as the work that enabled ChakraCore to work with Node.js, forged a new stable contract with Node.js’s VM, V8. Streamlined application framework choices as Node.js commits to defining standards and enabling sensible defaults for production use.” — Dan Shaw (@dshaw)
“First and foremost, continued adoption. Users can expect to see a greater variety of solutions in IoT and other kinds of instrumentation. Node.js provides a great deal of flexibility and utility, which makes it ideal for a variety of use cases.” — Mark Hinkle, Node.js Foundation (@mrhinkle)
“Node.js is well positioned to continue growth in fueling the as-a-service paradigm and serverless programming. Those are two key areas where the Node community will grow because it’s fundamental to those two areas.” — Wade Olson, Accenture
“I get the clear impression, especially from cloud vendors, that Node is one of most important workloads running on everyone’s cloud. Node.js has also become the de-facto language as the world moves off into serverless just by result of being the first. That’s creating new ecosystem opportunities that all center around Node with new demands and new work for the development team to consider. But it also creates opportunities for other partners, tool vendors, people who work to essentially provide gateways to APIs and other things to make those assets available.
“The future is headed toward exchanges, registries and other package managers that will provide the specialized view that a particular industry needs with a selected, curated, polished set of assets that are secure and meed the needs of a variety of enterprises up and down the vertical. That’s where we’re headed is to get to specialization. We’ve got broad generalization now with hundreds of thousands of packages. The opportunity in the ecosystem is to bring a curated view that businesses can depend on.” — Todd Moore, IBM (@tmmoore_1)
“Node.js will continue its impressive growth in terms of both user acceptance and dev community, but users will demand continued focus on greater security, better resource utilization in memory and CPU, faster starting time, and similar core features.” — Alex Pollitt, Tigera (@lxpollitt)
“From a user perspective, I think we’ll see continued stability and improved alignment with browser APIs. Things are going to become more consistent between what’s in Node.js and what’s in the browser. This is going to make it easier for the developer experience. The less developers can have two ways of doing things — one for Node, one for browser — the better.” — James Snell, nearForm (@jasnell)
“One thing that I noticed is that a pain point of using Node.js is the difficulty with debugging. It seems that a lot of the effort in talking about future would be resolving that.” — Tom Jacobs, Accenture
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So, there you have it: seven thoughts on the future of Node.js from the #NodeMinds network. Increased stability and continued reliability of Node.js will grow its surface area in cloud and as-a-service offerings. Node.js will continue streamline resource utilization and would benefit from improved debugging tooling.
Where do you think it’s heading? Where would you like it to head? Respond to this article or share your thoughts with us on Twitter using the #NodeMinds hashtag.
